Dems Run on Socialized Medicine — Another Reason They Must Never Come Back to Power

That a Democrat Senator is pushing full socialized medicine to oppose the Republican plan is revealing. Why not defend Obamacare as the great system that Democrats and the media insisted it was when they passed the Affordable Care Act? Realizing that’s a problem, Warren claims that Obama used “a conservative model” for healthcare. Really? A “conservative model” that every Republican in the House and Senate refused to vote for?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Tuesday that opposing the Republican health-care bill wasn’t enough and the Democratic Party should start running on a new national single-payer plan.

“President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts,” she told The Wall Street Journal. ”Now it’s time for the next step. And the next step is single payer.”

Polling has shown government-provided health care to be a very popular notion among Americans. Depending on whether it’s described as a public option, Medicare for all, or federally funded universal health care, proposals are supported by 57 to 61 percent of Americans, compared with only 19 to 24 percent opposed.

Sen. Bernie Sanders running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 with Medicare for all as a key promise brought a great deal of attention to the issue.

Two observations:

Americans may wish they could have free health care, but that doesn’t mean they are confident the government can do it. These polls don’t mean anything more that the polls showing a Hillary Clinton victory.

It is sad that the Democrats get to propose radically socialist programs, but Republicans refuse to do anything radical like truly defunding, deregulating, and privatizing all health care.

About the author

Joe Scudder

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.